Calcbot for iPad (and iPhone) - app review

Calcbot is a universal calculator application for iPad and iPhone. It is a basic scientific calculator but is designed well with big buttons and tape. For this review, we will be focusing on the iPad version.

In landscape, you will find the calculator on the left and tape on the right. The calculator has two pages of buttons which keeps them nice and big. Just swipe the calculator to the left to bring the next page of functions. The first page is primarily numbers and basic operators as well as power and root functions. The second page contains a more functions such at the specific powers of 2 and 3, square root, factorial, log, natural logarithm, exponential, and trigonometric functions. Tapping the shift key (up arrow) will change the trigonometric functions to their inverses. Calcbot lets you chose between radians and degrees as well. The second page does not include an equal sign. This is annoying because a calculation does not appear on the tape until the equal sign is tapped.

If you want to re-enter a calculation from the tape, just tap the desired calculation and a menu pops up to use result, use expression, copy, send in email, or delete. You can also swipe to delete any expression. To email or clear the entire tape, tap the wheel in the upper right hand corner. If you're not interested in seeing the tape, rotate to portrait mode to view only the calculator.

Calcbot is an excellent little calculator app that looks and works great. There is nothing fancy about it, but that's part of it's appeal. Calcbot is strait-forward and to the point which makes it easy and intuitive to use. Simply put, Calcbot is another visually appealing and terrifically designed app by Tapbots.

Leanna LofteFormer app and photography editor at iMore, Leanna has since moved on to other endeavors. Mother, wife, mathamagician, even though she no longer writes for iMore you can still follow her on Twitter @llofte.

Well it would be nice if there were a send via text option, but a (slightly cumbersome) workaround is to simply send the tape to email and then copy and paste it into a text message. Very awesome, another win for Tapbots!!! I guess it would get annoying if you use the calculator a lot, but I do kind of wish it had a fancier load screen like their other apps. Tiny complaint for an overall great app (though I'm definitely no math wiz so I can't say how useful it would be for engineers and scientists and such).

Ahhh. Just read the reviews and figured out why math people may not be happy (with its current iteration, I'm sure Tapbots will fix this): no parentheses!!! No percent sign either, but even I know to move the decimal two spots to the left so that's really no big deal. But no parentheses, ack! Why did they do that? Maybe a math wiz can shed some light on a workaround?